Gianfranco Fini, national leader of Italy’s neo-fascist Italian Social Movement, made a pilgrimage this weekend to Rome’s chief memorial to victims of Nazi and fascist wartime terror.
The brief Saturday visit to the Ardeantine Pits, where Fini placed white carnations, was his symbolic attempt to distance himself and his party from traditional fascism and make the neo-fascist MSI leader of a new conservative movement.
Fini was defeated last week for mayor of Rome in a runoff election, although he garnered 45 percent of the vote.
Neo-fascists took most cities in the first round of voting, but were routed in most Italian cities by candidates supported by the successors to the old Communist Party.
In Rome, Naples and elsewhere, MSI members will form the core of the opposition.
At an MSI central committee meeting after the visit to the monument, Fini announced that MSI candidates in the spring’s general elections would merge with other right-wing candidates under the name National Alliance.
Henceforth, the MSI is to consider itself “not fascist but post-fascist” — similar, it is hoped, to the evolution of Italy’s former Communists into the Democratic Party of the Left.
Fini’s visit to the Fosse Ardeatine — the caves south of Rome where more than 300 Romans, about 70 of the Jews, were executed by the Nazis in reprisal for a partisan attack — had not been announced beforehand.
At the MSI central committee meeting, word of his gesture was greeted by applause.
“I went there to pay homage to Italian martyrs, in the name of freedom and national pacification,” he said. His gesture was heavily criticized by almost all other parties.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
